Police in North Carolina have rescued a five-year-old girl who was discovered covered in wounds and locked inside a closet under a stairwell in her father’s empty house without food or water.
Randleman police went to the house in the 200 block of Back Street Tuesday after a someone reported a child was being physically and mentally abused.
Responding officers observed that there were no cars in the driveway and when they knocked on the door, no one answered. Then when they began calling out the girl’s name, they heard a voice.
Adam Byrd, 33 (left), and his girlfriend, 34-year-old Crystal Carnahan (right), have been charged with counts of child abuse and assault with a deadly weapon after police rescued the man’s malnourished 5-year-old daughter from a locked closet
Police found the child trapped inside a 2-by-4-foot storage space under a stairwell inside this home in Randleman, North Carolina
They asked if she was OK and she responded, ‘No.’ The officers asked if she needed help and the girl replied, ‘Yes.’
The officers climbed inside the house through a front porch window and located the child in a small closet measuring two feet by four feet under the stairwell.
According to police, the five-year-old appeared extremely malnourished and had burns, bruises and scratches all over her body.
The child’s father, 33-year-old Adam Byrd, and his girlfriend, 34-year-old Crystal Carnahan, were arrested the following day on charges of negligent child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon serious injury and intentional child abuse serious physical injury.
During a press conference on Thursday, Randleman Police Chief Steven Leonard said that while the girl had no access to any food or water, the closet where she was being kept stored rat poison, but it is believed the girl had not consumed the deadly substance, reported The Courier-Tribune.
The closet had no food or water for the starving girl, but was used to store rat poison, according to police
The girl was removed from the home by a day care worker who knew the family, given some takeout food from McDonald’s because she was hungry and taken to a hospital to be treated for her injuries.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget her face when she came out of the house,’ Tracy Harrell, owner of Randleman Enrichment Center where the five-year-old had been enrolled in the pre-school program during the previous school year, told WFMY News 2.
It was Harrell who reached out to the police on Monday to request a welfare check, saying that her staffer had visited Adam Byrd’s home on September 7 and found the 5-year-old looking thin, frail and covered in bruises.
Jailed: Carnahan is being held along with Byrd on $350,000 bond
On Tuesday, police officers brought Harrell along with them when they went to Byrd’s home so the girl would see a familiar face.
‘She latched on to me and just kept saying “don’t leave,”’ Harrell recounted.
The girl was later placed in the custody of the Randolph County Department of Social Services.
Police said the five-year-old had spent some time in the care of her step-grandmother’s brother before she was returned into her father’s home in June.
The step-grandmother said she had not seen the little girl since early June and contacted the local police at the time asking to check up on her.
Chief Leonard said his officers had spoken to both Byrd and Carnahan, and had made several unsuccessful attempts to see the child, but did not have sufficient probable cause to gain entry into Byrd’s home until this week.
Byrd had been the subject of multiple investigations by child services from the time his daughter was two years old, according to his stepmother.
Both Byrd and Carnahan were ordered held on $350,000 secured bond.